Wednesday, December 12, 2012

By the Numbers



I spent a few minutes today looking at my list of  'Books Read in 2012' thinking I could quickly calculate how many of my own books I had completed this year. One of my goals was to read from my own shelves and I wanted to see how I stacked up.

I started out well enough but then ran into the quandary: Should I count books I bought and read this year or should those be in a separate category? Should I just count the books I already owned as of January 1? 

Abandoning that dilemma for a moment, another compilation 
idea came to mind: the number of e-books that I read on my Nook (all of which were free). That led to me to wonder how I might determine the total number of books I bought this year. (This sum might be quite shocking as I just yesterday ordered four more books on-line from Powell's. The madness never stops!)

Looking further ahead, I thought of adding up the many books borrowed from the library and the number of authors I met this year. And maybe tallying the number of bookstores I had visited.

My left brain was really kicking in at this point. To further classify I thought I could calculate the number of female  vs. male authors represented on the list and then the number of fiction vs. non-fiction books and in addition the number of mysteries...

With that I gave up with nary a digit written down. It will take some ciphering to figure all this out and I am going to have to use a calculator along with some fingers and toes to come up with any concrete numbers.

Wish me luck.

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